How Leviathan Ate the GOP

“God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes. If they don’t do that, they have no useful function.”

Columnist Robert Novak was speaking of the party that embraced the revolution of Ronald Reagan, who had hung a portrait of Calvin Coolidge in his Cabinet Room and set about cutting income tax rates to 28 percent.

But, to be historically precise, the GOP was not put here to cut taxes. From infancy in the 1850s, its mission was to halt the spread of slavery. From 1865 to 1929, it was the party of high tariffs. Mission: Build the nation and protect U.S. industry and the wages of American workers.

And if the Deity commanded the GOP to cut taxes, the party has had an uneven record. Warren Harding and Coolidge cut Woodrow Wilson’s wartime tax rates by two-thirds, but Herbert Hoover nearly tripled the top rate.

Under Dwight Eisenhower, when the top tax rate was 91 percent, the GOP ratified the New Deal and provided the tax revenue to balance the budget at the elevated levels of spending 20 years of Democratic rule had established.

Richard Nixon followed suit. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, aid to education, the Peace Corps, the arts and humanities endowments, all of the Great Society programs grew — with Nixon adding OSHA, EPA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Cancer Institute.

Reagan cut tax rates to 50-year lows, but also accepted new gasoline and payroll taxes. George H.W. Bush then raised the top rate back to 35 percent.

George W. cut tax rates, but put two wars, prescription drug benefits for seniors and No Child Left Behind on the Visa card. Speaker Boehner is about to sign on to higher tax rates.

Point of this recitation: Republicans may talk of reducing the size of government, cutting taxes and balancing budgets. But the history of the last century suggests the party has been driven into what may be described as an inexorable long retreat.

When Coolidge left the White House to “Wonder Boy,” as he called Hoover, federal spending was 3 percent of gross national product.

Today, it is around 23 percent. Add state, county and municipal government spending, and we are at 38 percent. Anyone think this figure is going down in our lifetimes?

Can anyone say the GOP, if it is the party of small government and low taxes, has over the past 80 years been a successful party? Or does the America of today look more like the country Socialist Norman Thomas had in mind in 1932?

How, conceivably, can spending go down when, from 2012 to 2030, 75 million baby boomers will be retiring and going on Social Security and Medicare at a rate of 10,000 every day?

How can spending go down when a million legal immigrants arrive annually, 85 percent from the Third World, and most lacking the academic and linguistic abilities or the work skills of Americans?

These immigrants — and, with “immigration reform,” 11 million to 12 million illegals, as well — will be eligible for welfare, earned income tax credits, food stamps, rent supplements, Medicaid, Head Start, free schooling K-12 with two or three free meals a day at school, Pell Grants and student loans at graduation, job training and unemployment checks for 99 weeks.

Under Bush and Barack Obama both, these programs have exploded. And with 40 percent of all babies now born to single moms in America, does anyone believe these programs will shrink?

When the Great Wave of immigrants came between 1890 and 1920, these programs did not exist. In the 1930s, welfare was seen even by FDR as a temporary necessity to get through the hard times.

Our gargantuan welfare state of today, however, is permanent, as are the millions of government employees who milk and manage it.

Consider our largest government expenditures.

They would be, at the national level, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, homeland security and interest on the debt. At the state and local level, education, transportation — streets, highways, subways — and public safety.

If God put the Republican Party on this earth to cut taxes, how do we do his work in the face of these inexorable forces for increased spending? Do we ignore the surging deficits and soaring debt?

Mitt Romney said cutting tax rates would lead to a balanced budget. But when? The Bush tax cuts never did. His were the largest deficits of all, until the coming of Obama.

If we would see our future, we should look to Europe. There, the governments consume more than 40 percent of GDP and, in countries like France, almost 60 percent.

In Europe, the militaries have been hollowed out. Political parties face repudiation. Taxes in France have hit 75 percent. The wealthy flee. Pension promises are reneged upon. Government salaries are cut; employees laid off. Unemployment is astronomical for the young. The divisions deepen; the protests grow. Now, Europe’s banks, fearing social unrest, have started to emulate the Fed and buy up regime debt.

Looking at the West over the last century, the arc of history bends toward socialism and insolvency.

You are being disingenuous with your apparently deliberate attempt to pretend that Obama is to blame for ALL of the deficits under his time in office. Most of it is due to the Bush policies of spendinging like drunken teen girls with Daddy’s AMEX at the Juicy boutique. The drunken teens have never HAD to work a day in their life. Much like the man whose administrations created the mess that you are now partially blaming on Obama.

You know that debt: The debt that Bush ran up that grows daily due to the “cost of borrowing” – sums that the right wing falsely blame on Obama.

Republicans stop the growth of government? Heck, you guys have embraced it, and really shown Dems how it can be done. Unfunded prescription drug plans, Gitmo, bank and auto bailouts, police with drones. It has all fallen apart, and most of the damage was done under Bush’s watch. But I do understand that there were conservatives who opposed this, and that you were one of them Pat. You are in a shrinking group and your party has been taken over by people you really have very little in common with. I doubt the Republican party will last another generation.

I don’t think a single tax penny should be raised without cutting the size of government so as to reduce what is an insane debt and deficit spending minefield that will erode the foundations of who we are to begin with . . .if they haven’t already.

Can the party become the party of the individual again? If it ever was one? It’s one thing to trumpet self sufficiency but it’s another to actually look at the systematic way the share of production gains that used to go out to everyone involved are now siphoned straight up, and do something about it. Something that might feel like socialistic tampering in the free market. Anyone remember Teddy Roosevelt? Trust busting? The “Square Deal”? National parks and preservation? You get socialism today when there is nothing left because corporatism and financialization have robbed the national wealth. Until the party can speak to and for the individual, they’ll continue to sound like shills for the rich and the powerful, and no one will take them seriously.

See, Pat, that is the difference between your Silent Generation and the loony Baby Boomer Generation that has brought this once great nation to the brink. The difference? You are a realist. You are honest about inconvenient truths. But next month will be the anniversary of Clinton’s first inauguration and the beginning of two decades of pie-in-the-sky Baby Boomer pipe dreams. Expand government expenditures yet cutting revenues? Letting out good paying jobs and letting in a huge surplus of foreign job hunters? Wars to “spread democracy” and “win hearts and minds?” Giving risky loans to people who can’t afford them and repackaging them as securities? NAFTA, Iraq, No Child Left Behind, Gramm–Leach–Bliley – and on and on. All stupid attempts to bring the Age of Aquarius Utopia to us from these human relics of the Summer of Love.

The Greatest Generation is almost gone with the wind, and now Pat’s Silent Generation is making some of their last statements to remind us for a final occasion about the time when more rational thoughts prevailed before the curse of infinite and unreasonable optimism was foisted on us by the Baby Boomers. I wish my own Generation X could pick up where the Greatests and Silents left off, but I’m afraid the Baby Boomers that raised us have probably ruined us, too.

GOP politicians such as Jeb Bush and John McCain promote the idea for social welfare and amnesty for all illegal immigrants living inside the United States.

50% of wage-earners in America earn less than $27,000 a year, which makes them beneficiaries of medicaid, medicare, food stamps, free education for children, free health insurances due to ObamaCare, and subsidized housing.

GOP campaigns on cutting the benefits these beneficiaries rely on and cutting taxes that these beneficiaries do not have to pay.

The moment candidate Gov. Mitt Romney noticed momentum in his campaign, GOP war-drums started beating loud. GOP candidate wanted foreign wars, but did not tell Americans how those foreign wars would be paid by.

American voters are tired of GOP hypocrisy.

GOP has always made the government bigger, but says about reducing the size of government.

Under GOP stewardship, the U.S. government has become the largest employer of all Americans and consumes an even larger portion of the U.S. economy.

If you want limited government, then, given today’s politics, you have to support government policies which increase wages & jobs to where Americans don’t look to government to fulfill basic needs.

Example: Walmart is the largest private employer in the U. S., yet, many of its employees qualify for food stamps and even section 8 housing.

While the benefits are going to individuals, in reality, it’s corporate welfare on a massive scale because without those subsidies, Walmart would likely have to pay more for labor & benefits.

If Republicans don’t want to ditch moral issues, which resonate with many working class and middle class Americans, then they have to “bring those issues along” by also being a party which promotes more jobs & higher wages.

What did Republicans do which supported wage levels where women could choose to stay home raising children as was customary in America?

Many women would choose such a life-style if their men were getting paid enough to support a stay-at-home wife.

I thought “family” was the building block of society, yet, many Republicans, while giving lip-service to “family” and “family values”, support policies which drive down wages, so that women are driven into the work force, so the “family” is provided for financially.

The bottom line: If the private sector isn’t providing sufficient purchasing power to working class & middle class workers, then many will turn to government to meet those needs and vote for candidates who promise those benefits, which end up expanding government.

Republicans, if they want limited government, have to support policies which provide rising purchasing power of the working class and middle class.

So what is it going to be: Limited government or lower wages & fewer jobs and higher profits for international corporations — but expanded government in the process.

Good! Now move the debate from “big government” and the problem of its costs to what a democracy, for the people by the people, wants to spend its money on. Stop looking at the “earmarks” of republican angst that either amount to small costs or are successful democratic programs favored by the majority, and start looking at the very encumbrances thrust on us by the neo-con empire hawks and free marketeers that are not budgeted for and the very policies responsible for our economic distress. Don’t sweat the small stuff, and stop using the small stuff to support your big government is the problem stand. Big government is the scapegoat and tool of K street lobbyists. If you are going to use it, define it with what is actually big and stop standing on the lame “I told you we are all going down because of the godless among us”, stop despairing Pat (god said so), and stop pushing immigration, environmental and financial regulations as representative of our problems and offer up some solutions to how the government people want might actually be funded, since insolvency is the problem of political football with disingenuous campaign promises. A large part of what we don’t want may have rcvd a mortal blow with the loss by Romney. Virginia MIC and the israelies have been moved to the back of the line with the right to own military weapons of mass murder soon to join them. Romney: “Bad things are going to happen regardless of guns” never even stood up in a grade school class and now floats in a pool of grade school blood. Leviathan has been dealt a blow of logic rising from necessity. Fix social security and Medicare without going after the little stuff that democracy wants, and the democratic programs to help the sick and elderly can hardly be called leviathan except by the leviathan of global corporate financialization and disembowlment of labor, that sees them as a threat to power and greed’s domination. If you are waiting for private enterprise to take care of original sin, then you are waiting for hell to freeze over on a warming planet. Stop providing mirth to evil, which we may not be able to outsmart, but can’t we at least stop it from laughing at us idolizing our creations?

Boehner and his group think limiting the rate of growth in government is doing something. While I don’t care for him,and he ran a terrible campaign,I loved a quote Rick Perry made in the debates. His goal was to make Washington DC as inconsequential to people’s everyday lives as possible.

I would expect rates to rise or fall in relation to inflation and deflationary cycles.

I don’t much care about the rates. That doesn’t really say much about where we are headed. If people want government, they should bewilling to pay for it —-

But my suspicions are we have a government most people don’t like, trust or want. They are reacting out of fear of what might be the street. But given our deficit, I think it’s clear that we could cut size and still prevent people living on the street or health services.

Afterall, we have a new health care requiring to have insurance – seems to me. We should be expected to live with it or was that just a joke?

His policies on labor – looking the other way on illegals and amnestying them and guest workers along with free trade eventually gutted the tax base. One of the very few good things he did was index taxes to inflation. However, if you do that and pursue policies designed to drive wages down, fewer and fewer people pay into the system.

His lax oversight on Wall Street and in the banking sector led to the S&L crisis that we paid for and was the dry run for the recent banking crisis. (Wall Street learned to play dumb to stay out of jail).

His massive wasteful spending on defense even when he knew the USSR was on the brink of collapse is still with us today.

Those European afflictions have a Wall Street pedigree, just as Wall Street”s 1929 crash fomented a worldwide depression, arguably enabling fascism, communism and all the imperial consequences we are living with today.

To echo Reagan on Mondale, but about the plutocrats, I have to shake my head and observe, “There they go again.”

If the Democrat Party is the party of Progressives (socialists) then the Republican Party has become the Party of the Conservative Socialist. That is,with the Republicans, things stay the same but at a more “modest” pace. Pat is correct. Most of the ideas and platforms of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party have come to fruition in America. And as with most things Socialist, it has bankrupted America. The question to ask now is: What is to be done about it? What can anyone who believes in liberty,small government,self reliance and self responsibility do when a voting majority have thrown away their birthright of liberty for the false promise of security? Does anyone whose livelihood depends on a government check wish to give up that check in exchange for self reliance in the great American free enterprise system? I doubt it very much. The collectivists,over the last 80 years,have done an excellent job of paving the road toward socialism and fascism by creating a nation of a voting majority called the dependency class. This voting majority will not give up their position without a fight. This why we have the kind of government we now have. What is ironic is that in 1776 Americans fought to be free. Today,however, Americans will fight to be enslaved. A pity.

“Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, aid to education, the Peace Corps, the arts and humanities endowments, all of the Great Society programs grew — with Nixon adding OSHA, EPA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Cancer Institute.”
For those of you who blame the baby boomers all of these programs were put in place by politicians of the so called greatest generation who were elected by voters of same generation.
The biggest advocates of the Income Tax and Federal Reserve were Republicans. Both made it much easier to engage in foreign military operations.

The GOP is into defense-industrial welfare. Romney was talking about cutting government spending while planning to build up the naval fleet and the number if ships and increasing the number of military personnel. The military is, hands down, the largest jobs program. And unlike Peace Corps and Social Security it is a program that Americans have to foot the bill for benefits for the life of the person.
And under Bush and the Republicans we got the black hole of homeland and intelligence spending.

In addition to this the GOP has been behind gutting U.S. industry for hire profits for corporations. They cheered outsourcing and having cheap labor from illegals. All the while they have made the rules advantageous for the financial services sector. The middlemen, the traders, have become our industry and the rulers. In the last two words of the late Christopher Hitchens, “Capitalism collapse. Capitalism collapse.”

God put the Republican Party on earth to abolish slavery. Since that was accomplished, I can’t think of a single useful function the GOP has served.

Before the peanut gallery gears up, true, the Republican Party platform did not contemplate ending slavery in the states where it existed. But, we’re talking about how God used the party, not what the party presented, in all good faith, to the voters.

Closing the territories to slavery meant no expanding market for slave trading, which meant lower prices for human chattel, which popped a speculative bubble that the southern elite had a lot of their capital tied up in. That’s why they engineered secession, and that opened a cascading sequence of events that made abolition of slavery inevitable.

Since 1980, the Republican Party has been the party of deficit spending, a matter of considerable embarrassment to my mother, a life-long Republican and fiscal conservative.

Both, that is BOTH majaor political parties have forgotten Federalism, both in principle and in practice.

Federalism, a most excellent invention of the Founders (howbeit accidental a political compromise it may have been), recognizes both the principle of Solidarity (that we are One Nation, whose welfare is the concern of all), and tat of Subsidarity (that an action is best done by the lowest level of society/government capable of performing the task.)

The Reps want a big government that can beat up on everybody else in the world, and chuck in the slammer anyone who disagrees with the sovereign right of the rich to get richer. (Except only those rabid Tea-Party ideologues who want to eleminate all government a la Grover -the -king -has -no -clothes- Norquist.)

The Dems seem to want cradle-to-grave security no matter who has to be drug to the bar to achieve it. (Of whose unfortunate policies, we shall not further speak.)

Nobody — NOBODY — wants to talk about Right-Sizing Government. Because That is Federalism, and nobody seems to now what it means.

It is progressivism that has brought us to this place, and the progressives who have foisted this national suicide on us intended it from the start. For the progressives, the destruction of the United States of America is necessary and good because it will contribute to fulfilling the Hegelian destiny of the world. Naturally, the debate is never framed in those terms because nobody in their right mind would vote for, say, an Obama, if it were. Rather, the program is couched in terms such as “no one should go hungry, be cold, or lack basic health care” because it is easy to demonize anyone who disagrees.

Why is it that just because someone was born they automatically deserve food, clothing, shelter, and medical care paid for by someone else? What is the moral and philosophical basis for the idea that government should be empowered to solve every conceivable problem? Who set up government to be the arbiter of every question a citizen must answer? Answer those questions and I have a hundred more, you progressives/liberals/leftists/socialists or whatever happens to be your nom du jour.

And, by the way, stop changing the subject. The essence of conservatism is that government should never have the power to solve problems people should rightly solve themselves. And that, by the way, is also the essence of LIBERTY!